NYT: Bush Reads Books! But...

We all know that President Bush is an ignoramus. So when it is reported that the First Lady gave him a copy of Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s Mao: The Untold Story and that the president actually read it, what are we to think?

Have no fear, The New York Times’ own Elizabeth Bumiller is there to help us out.

Apparently, when Unions-bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel was visiting the White House conversation included reference to Chang and Halliday’s Mao which “has been embraced by the right as a searing indictment of Communism.”

Well, that is good, in a way. “But.” (You knew that was coming.)

But [Andrew J. Nathan, a specialist in Chinese politics at Columbia University], who last year in The London Review of Books criticized what he called the authors’ vague and inaccessible sourcing, said that the biography presented Mao as a “comic-book monster,” with little explanation of the psychological, sociological and historical forces that allowed him to rise.

Oh no! So the ill-educated and intellectually naive President Bush, lacking a proper understanding of the psychological, sociological and historical reality of Mao’s time, might get the wrong message out of the book. This, it must be admitted, is a real danger.

Although there is no real danger of, say, President Bush getting the eroneous idea that Mao was a chatty sort of chap who liked hanging out with students so much that he invited them all to come and visit him in Beijing one day in 1966.

No. The real danger is that President Bush might come to the conclusion that Mao was a fiend who starved millions of Chinese to death in the 1950s so he could export food and buy weapons and technology from the Soviets. And we can’t have that.

But not to worry, says everyone’s favorite historian, Doris Kearns Goodwin. The president probably was just reading for recreation.

"To be honest, I’m not sure that it’s so weird for him to be reading this," said Doris Kearns Goodwin... "partly why presidents read is the reason that we all read: to relax, to replenish our energy and to go into another era and another time."

Anyone else detecting an odor of nauseating condescension here?

We wouldn’t want to get boxed into admitting that President Bush was a serious man with a serious grasp of world history, would we?